Best Science Visualization Videos of 2009

Some of the most impressive images in science are produced when researchers take numerical data and represent it visually through modeling and computer graphics. The Department of Energy honored 10 of this year’s best scientific visualizations with its annual SciDAC Vis Night awards, at the Scientific Discovery through Advanced Computing conference (SciDAC) in June. Researchers submitted visualizations to the contest, and program participants voted on the best of the best. From earthquakes to jet flames, this gallery of videos and images show how beautiful (and descriptive) visual data can be.

(We’ve adapted the captions from the SciDAC Vis Night blurbs.)

Above: The Big One

This visualization illustrates some of the rupture and wave propagation phenomena of a magnitude 7.8 earthquake on the San Andreas fault in Southern California. It shows how an earthquake originating 60 miles south of Palm Springs can end up shaking Los Angeles, Ventura and Santa Barbara minutes after the original fault rupture. The animation captures more than four minutes of complex dynamic rupture and wave propagation. Nearly 12 terabytes of earthquake simulation data was used to generate the animation.

Simulating how waves break as they travel around a ship is one of the most complicated problems in hydrodynamics. This clip is a compilation of videos showing the evolution of a project called “Breaking Waves,” funded by the Department of Defense. It uses numerical flow analysis to tackle the challenge. Throughout the video, the increasing complexity of the simulation and improved rendering of the data show how the project has evolved over the past five years.

Here we see how levels of carbon dioxide build up in North America during the winter months and then drop during the summer. Plants convert carbon dioxide into organic compounds using the energy from sunlight, so changes in the amount of sunlight create seasonal differences in carbon dioxide levels. Data for this video was collected by NASA’s Goddard Earth Observing System Model, Version 5 (GEOS-5), which is a system of models designed to collect earth science data for climate and weather prediction.

Volume rendering is a technique used to display two-dimensional data in three-dimensional space. ImageVis3D is a new volume-rendering program developed by the NIH/NCRR Center for Integrative Biomedical Computing, designed to be simpler, faster and more interactive than standard volume-rendering programs. This video demonstrates some of the key features of ImageVis3D and gives examples of the type of data it can render in three dimensions.

A Lifted Ethylene-Air Jet Flame Stabilized by Autoignition in a Heated-Air Co-flow

This video demonstrates how a jet flame made of ethylene and air can be stabilized by a co-flow of preheated air. As the ethylene fuel interacts with air particles by diffusion, massless tracer particles show how the two substances react with each other. The researchers say this visualization will help study models for similar combustion processes that occur in “non-premixed” (fuel and air separated) scenarios.

Non-Newtonian fluids are substances that don’t have constant flow properties or a constant viscosity. These suspensions are found in building materials such as paint, concrete and mortar. This simulation examines how the viscosity of a non-Newtonian fluid changes as strain is applied: The fluid at the center stays viscous while a force is applied to the boundary. The researchers say this observation could have practical implications for construction — for example, in a situation where construction workers want to control the flow of concrete as they finish a surface.

This model depicts the global turbulent transport of plasma using geometric data from the National Spherical Torus Experiment. Researchers say the data was difficult to render directly, but they developed a technique to efficiently store, access and transform the simulation data in graphics memory, which lets them render the irregularly shaped plasma grids.

Type Ia supernovae are thought to be white dwarf stars in binary systems that explode due to a thermonuclear runaway. This movie shows a simulation of Type Ia supernovae exploding from multiple ignition points. When the hot ash breaks through the surface of the star, it spreads rapidly across the stellar surface, converges at the opposite point and produces a jet-like flow that triggers a detonation. The simulation shows that multiple ignition points generate more nuclear burning and produce more expansion of the star than a single ignition point. As a result, less radioactive nickel is produced during the detonation phase, and the explosion is less luminous.

Here we see the turbulent flow of coolant into a mock-up of an advanced recycling nuclear reactor. The colors indicate the speed of the fluid, with red representing regions of high velocity and blue representing regions of low velocity. The simulation used 23 million grid points and represents 60 seconds of flow time.